Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy
-
I don't want anyone staying on Reddit tbh
-
Better UX than Reddit, they even point out that it’s like old.reddit instead of the trash UX they have now
It’s just dismissive to get people to agree without looking
-
Because email federation is inherent to everyone's understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email "instances" are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a "server" or "instance," they're signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.
It's easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what "the cloud" is: they pause and ponder and then guess "satellites?" because they've never even wondered about it. I'm guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to "enable" on their phone by installing it.
People know that software is "made up of code," but they don't understand what that means. The idea that an "application" is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I'd guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn't understand that, it's honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.
And most importantly: this is not any user's fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.
We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us ("I have a foreboding [of a time...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues" - Carl Sagan) and we simply can't deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.
-
-
-
I do the same on mobile
but I think once people do understand federation and why its actually a very good idea they would too - but thats not going to be true of the majority - certainly not before they use a federated service. -
-
They didn’t, they signed up for gmail.
-
But that's not great. It's great if you're not interested in a social networking forum and want a meme feed sure but I don't. I want people, I want the damaged ego people and I want to ask and talk to them about how they ended up like that
-
-
I doubt they even know there's anything other than gmail.
-
I get you.
But honestly come I'm kind of liking the vibe here and it's not just a meme feed. More often than not you can have a real conversation with somebody you disagree with, you concied, they concied, learn a little bit about each other, follow a couple people maybe block a few assholes.
The first few redis exoduses filled the place with the people with the lowest tolerance for bullshit. Every time Reddit has a new Exodus, We get topped off with the next level of people that just want to watch everyone be pissed off.
-
That's UI. What they're talking about is the barrier to entry for new users, which falls under User eXperience
-
I am aware of the difference
I was only commenting on one part of it
-
-
-
The question is: do we want people to leave corporate services, and join the fediverse, or not? By showing such hostility towards such "crybabies" we will never get any traction.
We are facing a problem. "Crybabies" are arguing about lack of content and/or difficulty on signing up. People on Lemmy are arguing that they don't want such users in their communities. Other people, thinking of onboarding, may not join after seeing hostile users like you.
-
-
simply spin the wheel
That’s how the Lemmy info page (what comes up when you search for “Lemmy”) does it, and the experience isn’t great.
Before I knew how Lemmy worked I just clicked the first option it showed, which (for me) was a non-English instance. The second option was that LGBT-focused instance that defederated with lemmy.world a few months ago. Of course I didn’t know anything about either community so I just picked randomly. I went right back to Reddit until they pulled the next anti-user thing.
-
